It seems odd though that an already assigned ip from the router to my nic would allow a vm client to basically crawl back along my router assigned ip and try and get a new dhcp lease assigned.
The physical is just passing the packets so if the packet conatins a DHCP request that is passed on to the network independent of what the physical NIC has done - do you have a route built to the 10. network? WHen the VMs are assigned a 192 . address are they able to get to the INternet?
What might be happening is the rotuer is responding to the DHCP request first -
